The widow herself was the origin of the girl's slight disqualification for being of that higher circle of selection which nature arranges long before society makes its judicial decision.

The father had been a man of high intelligence, which his daughter to a real degree inherited; but the mother, as kind a soul as ever lived, was a product of southern English rural life--a little sumptuous, but wholesome, and for her daughter's sake at least, keeping herself well and safely within the moral pale in the midst of marked temptations.

She was forty-five, and it said a good deal for her ample but proper graces that at forty-five she had numerous admirers.

The girl was English in appearance, with a touch perhaps of Spanish--why, who can say?
Was it because of those Spanish hidalgoes wrecked on the Irish coast long since?
Her mind and her tongue, however, were Irish like her father's.

You would have liked her, everybody did,--yet you would have thought that nature had failed in self-confidence for once, she was so pointedly designed to express the ancient dame's colour-scheme, even to the delicate auriferous down on her youthful cheek and the purse-proud look of her faintly retrousse nose; though in fact she never had had a purse and scarcely needed one.